However dramatic footage has now emerged online, which purports to show the final moments of the doomed airliner as it falls through the air, before it appears to explode and engulfs into a ball of smoke and flames.

Egypt’s North Sinai is home to a two-year-old Islamist insurgency and militants who support Islamic State have killed hundreds of Egyptian soldiers and police in recent months.But officials in Cairo and Moscow were quick to quash any possible link to terrorism in the tragedy, which was one of the deadliest plane crashes in the past decade.

And the co-pilot allegedly complained to his family that the aircraft's condition "left much to be desired" shortly before the doomed flight took off.

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The video purports to show the jet's final moments

Early reports said it split into two and that suggests a catastrophic failure, not a mechanical failure, but perhaps an explosion on board

Professor Michael Clarke

The aircraft, which was was flying from the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh destined for the Russian city of St Petersburg, was said to have split in half mid-air scattering debris and bodies over a wide area in remote Sinai, Egypt.

Burnt corpses were found 3.1 miles away from the crashed aircraft, and this morning search and rescue teams recovered the body of a three-year-old girl some five miles from the crash scene.

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He said: "This aircraft was 200km north of its take-off zone, that means it was flying at around 31,000 feet. Terrorists, as far as we know, don’t have equipment to take down an aircraft at that height.

"Early reports said it split into two and that suggests a catastrophic failure, not a mechanical failure, but perhaps an explosion on board.

"So I would be much more inclined to think, if we have to guess at this stage, it is much more likely to have been a bomb on board than a missile fired from the ground.

"And there’s no sign of a distress call, so the idea that the aircraft was undergoing an mechanical problem, or an engine problem, or a fire, or something like that, you would expect that there would be some sort of distress call beforehand."